Retrospective

I suppose I should start with the traditional “Where has the time gone?” but fortunately my blog is a perfect record for answering questions like that. My programming skills have increased immeasurably, having produced several world-accessible PHP programs and fixing bugs in or adding features to popular software. I have got a Linux phone and started to explore its almost limitless potential, and on a related note, configured a secure and reliable email system based around my home machine. Apparently I also feel I have a lot to say about standards and security, and haven’t made enough time for the excellent comic I’ve been co-creating.

Another thing to do at a moment like this is to look back one year and see what my view of this blog was then, and how that compares to now. Back then I thought:

You SHOULD NOT put stuff about your personal life. No one is interested, it’s a privacy issue, and you don’t want to be tied to keeping this up-to-date.

and I still do; in fact I hope I now have a better idea of where to draw the line between personal and public.

I also thought:

You SHOULD NOT put stuff that everyone else writes about. There are already thousands of blogs out there containing film reviews, opinions on news articles, a copy of the latest meme circulating. One more adds more noise than signal.

which I agree with. Some people are very readable when they talk about places they’ve visited or films they’ve seen, and I don’t think I can justify spending the time it would take me to compete with that. I admit I have written a lot about blogging, but a lot of that is as an aid to administering this, or as part of the greater topic of the future of the (semantic) Web.

Last year I wrote:

You SHOULD put stuff about your programming projects. When I come up with an idea, I check on the web to see if anyone else has already done it. This stops people having to reinvent the wheel.

which I hope I have lived up to admirably; better than I expected, actually. Working on programming projects in one’s spare time can be quite demanding, especially making them non-trivial enough to blog about and then going to the trouble of writing them up. Similarly finding a bug and being one of the first to publish a solution is difficult given the high quality of the software I use, so I’m glad I have managed to.

Then I wrote:

You SHOULD put stuff that needs general hosting. The comic needs world attention, or at least I want to be able to point people to it online. Writing my own web site for each individual project would be nice, but not efficient.

I have put up several things, including a place holder for the comic which is on hiatus. Having ad-free hosting is very convenient and the reliability and longevity of my blog is in no small part thanks to my wonderful hosting provider (who I still haven’t met in person).

Finally there was:

You MAY discuss various standards and give an opinion. Potential problems with standards and advocacy for their alternatives are not particularly well documented on the web, especially not in a one centralised place.

I have done a bit of this, but not as much as I expected or would have liked. Posts about standards are at the top of my backlog list, but I am encouraged to see that a lot of long-time issues holding back standards adoption are being resolved, which should mean my posts will have more of a mood of advocacy than rhetoric.

No retrospective would be complete without some statistics, though, so let’s say what the latest news from the WordPress dashboard is: as of this post, there are

38 posts and 33 comments, contained within 8 categories

and I have just managed to produce 2 posts a month for the past couple of months, which seems like a maintainable target for now. I had hoped to keep the post size down, but I don’t want to cut myself short; if I have something to say which requires a lot of writing I will keep working at that post until it gets finished. A graph of blog post length against time would be interesting right now, but I don’t want to go through the process of gathering the data without taking notes and doing it properly so I could write a post about how I did it.

Here’s another statistic, and a look to the future, Technorati says

Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard Rank: 1,195,250 (11 links from 1 blog)

which means being in the top 1 million blogs is an achievable goal, and one I will be working on from now on. That statistic also reminds me to thank the people who have linked to me, and have let me link to them. I hope to make more friends and more blogging friends so I can add them to my list and provide a rich base of data for people to create innovative services on.

What else does the future hold? Ask me at the end of the year and I might be able to give you a very accurate answer.